Keeping Visual Effects in Los Angeles

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Why Los Angeles?

Why get your visual effects done in LA? Isn’t it all leaving for Vancouver, London, and New York?

Quite simply, it’s quality, speed, interaction with the team. With all of the major American studios being located in a 20 mile radius, and most of them in a 4 mile radius, it is really easy to justify having more, not less, visual effect artisans and studios in Los Angeles.

Los Angeles, home to American film and television, accounts for a great deal of the economy in Southern California. It has a rich history full of experienced professionals who all learned from ‘someone who came before them.’ This is the power of the Los Angeles market, and to a similar degree, the San Francisco area. The people who invented the techniques and workflows that are so common today, did so while learning how to do it on scale and on budget needed for some of the biggest block busters in history.

It is this legacy that has translated down generations of artists and makes the quality second to none. Most of the artists that come to Los Angeles come to learn how to be great artists. They work in a competitive market and work with some of the best existing talent on the planet. This isn’t the case in the other markets and countries that now host a number of larger projects and production houses. Many other VFX communities have to work on developing their own workflows in their own ways that sometimes aren’t as successful. They have to import Americans, or Los Angeles natives to try and teach them how to be successful. At the end of the day, many productions are brought back to Los Angeles to save at the last minute because the work done elsewhere wasn’t the quality that the studio was used to.

The argument that we put forth is that it isn’t worth leaving the comfort of your own community of talent to get the work done. There is still an enormous talent pool here that can be drawn on to get top notch work done for the budget required by productions. Of course there are still giants like ILM and DD that will drive innovation and come up with the ‘next big thing’, but for the bread and butter effects required for features and television, the talent is here. The talent is more than qualified, and the talent is affordable.